Folks, we need people to start hitting the ‘solved’ key when a reply answers the question. The solved icon then shows up and we know that one doesn’t need attention any more. Also, the person that answers it gets encouraged to answer another one, which is good for everyone.
Only the original poster or a moderator can tick a reply as being the solution, but any of you can leave a little polite reply and you’ll be helping the forum run smoothly if you do.
So if you think a question has been answered and that button hasn’t been ticked (by a day or so) then feel free to give the original poster a polite little nudge?
Put another way, if you want the experienced contributors to answer your question you don’t want them wasting hours trying to work out what still needs an answer.
I just bumped a few posts. Now they probably show as unread for everybody, doing exactly the opposite of what we wanted to: make you spend more time looking at subjects without news
Maybe we could in such cases add a tag “need_feedback” or so because that would show up in the topics. I did that experimentally on one of the topics. But it requires moderator privileges and takes time, so it’s not optimal.
Sounds good and it’s pretty easy. I just did it with two older threads. It’s pretty neat to see all those “solved” topics in the early Discourse history!
I sometimes procrastinate by going to old threads where “solved” has not been ticked. In a great deal of them, the problem does seem to have been resolved. E.g. in Status of pyxid package where @jon fixes a bug and the OP says that it works when pulling the commits. Should I just go ahead and tick “solved” on jon’s answer to let future users know that this was a bug that is now fixed?
In other threads, there is a reply which clearly solves the problem, but the OP never responds. Should we tick “solved” there, again as a service to future users, or is it too risky? I guess that if it somehow turns out not to work for some users, they will reply to the thread or post as a new issue that it didn’t work for them.
If it’s ambiguous whether the reply solved it for the user (e.g. if it’s an actual solution but very technical for the average user), the way forward is of course to PM the OP about giving feedback. The issue I’m raising here is just that it’s just a slow process when it’s almost certain that a solution has been posted.
I’m mostly giving up trying to tell the OP to tick solved - it doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe we should just add a line to the bottom of every reply “If this solves your issue please tick solved”
On the other hand, if I have a strong suspicion that the problem is solved I have been ticking the box on my own answers! This should be used with caution, for sure, but there are some answers where I’m really confident I’ve identified the problem
